Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is one of the reasons we have a coal-dependent infrastructure, with the resulting environmental impact that all of us can see. I suspect environmentalists, through their opposition of nuclear power, have caused more coal plants to be built than anybody. And those coal plants have emitted more radioactive material from the coal than any nuclear accident would have.

In the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.

Certain food-based biofuels like biodiesel have always been a bad idea. Others like corn ethanol have served a useful purpose and essentially are obsoleting themselves.

Seeking an acquisition from the start is more than just bad advice for an entrepreneur. For the entrepreneur it leads to short term tactical decisions rather than company-building decisions and in my view often reduces the probability of success.

No one will pay you to solve a non-problem.

Setting an aggressive enough carbon-reduction goal will result in an appropriate price for carbon and will help many a renewable technology. Consumer education will help. Most importantly, though, will be the continually declining cost trajectory of the real breakthrough in clean-technology costs driven by research and innovation. In the end, private capital is the real barometer of change.

Religion asks you to believe things without questioning, and technology and science always encourage you to ask hard questions and why it is important in science and technology. So I was always interested in science and technology.